Occurrence and bioconcentration of organic UV filters in primary marine consumers

Abstract

Organic ultraviolet (UV) filters are added in different products to absorb UV radiation, whose use has been voiced due to increasing concerning about skin damage. Given their extensive production, these compounds are continuously released to the aquatic environment, which makes them an important family of emerging pollutants. Their presence in the marine environment poses a hazard to the living organisms exposed to them. Primary marine consumers can be recognised as sentinels of pollution in marine environments. In this study, the occurrence of eight widely used organic UV filters was analysed in five different primary marine consumers from three beaches on the Gran Canaria Island (Spain) collected for 4 months. For that, a new method, based on microwave-assisted extraction and ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry in tandem, was optimized and validate. The developed method presented detection limits between 0.7 ng·g−1 dry weight (dw) and 7.1 ng·g−1 dw and intraday and interday precision with ranges from 0.2 % to 9.9 % and from 1.9 % to 12.4 %, respectively. The method was applied to 20 samples comprising five different types of organisms. All the analysed samples revealed the presence of organic UV filters, in all samples at least one analyte was determined. The highest detection frequency corresponded to butyl methoxydibenzoylmethane (BMDBM) (55 %), while octocrylene (OC) was found at the highest concentration (1,735 ng·g−1 dw) in the sea hare Aplysia dactylomela. At the same time, a preliminary bioconcentration and biomagnification assessment was made for the UV filters found in the studied marine organisms. Bioconcentration factors (Log values) over 3.7 were obtained in some cases, which suggests possible bioaccumulation. 4-methylbenzylidene camphor (4MBC) and drometrizole trisiloxane (DTS) obtained a biomagnification factor over 1, which implies potential biomagnification for these compounds.